And you can’t talk about language and thought without considering cognition.
And so much of this is driven not only by biology, but also by culture and experience.
TODO: Minds and Brains
Linguistic relativity asserts that language influences worldview or cognition. You’ll sometimes hear it called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” of which there are two main versions:
Language determines thought — we cannot think what we cannot say. Now largely discredited.
Language influences habitual thought. Now supported empirically. Classic example: languages with different color terms lead to faster discrimination at term boundaries.
The Wikipedia page on linguistic relativity provides a good overview.
There are a few interesting examples of how language can (or may) shape thought:
English and other languages are egocentric: the terms left, right, front, back are relative to speaker. But in Guugu Yimithirr direction is absolute: things are north, south, east, west, always, even indoors, even in the dark.
Pirahã may not have exact numbers beyond one, two, few, many. But they get along fine without number words.
We often think in language, but not always. Visual-spatial reasoning, musical thought, mathematical intuition are not obviously linguistic. Language may be a formatting layer that makes thoughts communicable and memorable, not the medium of thought itself.
The Pirahã, and their immediacy of experience, again:
Charles Sanders Peirce identified three types of signs:
Human language is overwhelmingly symbolic. This is extraordinary! No other species uses symbols at scale. And we’ve been doing it for a long time:
Symbols are fascinating because they have no intrinsic connection to their referent. They require (a) shared convention, (b) memory, (c) the ability to hold “word” and “meaning” as linked but separate. The power is unlimited generativity — you can make a symbol for anything, even abstractions: justice, infinity, recursion, love, LLM, the meaning of life, etc.
But where do symbols come from? How does a word hook onto the world? Philosophers call this the symbol grounding problem. Harnad (1990) says symbols in a closed formal system only refer to other symbols—they’re not grounded. Note that a dictionary defines words with more words. There is no base word. Humans ground symbols through perception and action
Before you can teach a word, both parties must be attending to the same thing. Infants develop a (proto-linguistic) joint attention at ~9 months. Without joint attention, ostensive definition (“that’s a dog”) doesn’t work.
Pointing is surprisingly rare in non-human primates.
TODO
Here are some questions useful for your spaced repetition learning. Many of the answers are not found on this page. Some will have popped up in lecture. Others will require you to do your own research.
TODOWe’ve covered: